Dog Days
by bisexualcharliedavis
Summary: Charlie, Danny, Charlie's cadaver dog, Lucy, all out on a wet wet afternoon. They get to talking about a certain absent friend.


_A/N: it's been way too long since I had a finished fic to post whoops. But that isnt to say I haven't been writing, just that I'm much slower now then I have been. So, here's a fic playing with this hc I have about Charlie loving dogs. If you want to imagine what sort of dog Lucy is, imagine golden retriever or really whatever dog you think he'd like lol. Warnings for minor injures and minor blood. _

It's too cold for this sort of thing, Danny thought. The chill was marrow-deep, and settling on his cheeks and his nose. Charlie seemed unbothered by the chill and kept pace with the dog ahead of him with ease. Danny was lagging behind just slightly, not as used to the rough terrain of the bush underfoot mixed with the speed of the animal.

Despite the barest hint of a limp in Charlie's left leg, he seemed happy enough to be walking. No one has had the gumption to ask him about it and he's never volunteered the information so Danny worked on the assumption that it was none of his business. The dog was just as happy to be outside, galloping along, smelling the trees and brush as they passed by.

The sky overhead was grey, and every so often a rumble of thunder passed by. No rain, but. Maybe that was a good thing. He knew Charlie wasn't likely to abandon his search for a little rain. But Danny just can't imagine anything worse than traversing the bush in wet socks. Well, there are clearly worse things than wet socks, but not that he was in the mood to think about.

The dog, Lucy, gave a little bark and insistently pulled Charlie's attention to a large plant. He obliged her and paused to nudge the undergrowth with his foot. She sniffed at it, contemplated, then carried on. Charlie shook his head and let out a breath of air Danny could see in condensation. Like a dragon, he used to say when he was a kid.

Then, he broke into a jog to catch up with her. The limp became more noticeable. Back when Danny did he knee in, he used to run like that, he thought. Sometimes, he wished he was still trying to play cricket professionally. Unlike his companion, and most of his friends, being a cop was a job. Not his life. His heart, he knew, would always belong to cricket. The fact that he would never be able to make a living from it was his great tragedy.

"Do you always walk this fast or are you just trying to impress me?" he said, as they rounded a bend and the dog paused to smell some more bushes.

"It's a nice morning for a brisk stroll." Charlie responded, "It's good for you. Get that blood pumping."

"Don't say that," Danny said, maybe harsher than he intended. He felt bad not a second later. Charlie didn't know about the snake thing, or Mattie and the car. And why would he have to? He was Lawson's golden child. He was pretty sure Charlie and Matthew had some kind of telepathic bond that allowed them to communicate through grunts and sighs.

Hell; Charlie seemed to be everyone's golden child. Even his aunt seemed overjoyed to have him back at the house and had been insisting Danny should let him have his old room back before Charlie told her that it was fine and that he'd sleep whenever there was a spare bed.

Even Amy, the girl Danny had been trying to get through to his entire life, seemed to listen when he spoke. He had no idea why but they seemed to be getting along pretty well. Better than he got on with her at any rate.

Then he felt bad for being so...Judgemental. Charlie didn't ask for any of that. In fact, the only thing he could ever remember Charlie asking for was for him to pass the salt at the table. Which in turn just made him feel worse because the reason he'd wanted the salt was so he could make whatever monstrosity Rose claimed to be food palatable. He was too nice to just not eat it.

"Danny?"

"Huh?"

"I asked if you need to slow down." He repeated, sounding a little frustrated. Danny wasn't sure if it was because he needed to slow down or because he wasn't paying attention when Charlie had told him, specifically, that he'd only be allowed to come along if he swore on his aunt's life to pay attention to his instructions.

"No, I'm fine." He answered, hastily, embarrassed. Charlie tossed him a look over his shoulder and then produced a map from his back pocket, and while they walked he scratched over an area with his pen. If he had to guess, it was an indication that the dog hadn't indicated to anything here. He did know what it looked like, when Lucy indicated the presence of a body because whenever Alice came over she started freaking out. Everyone thought it was funny, except Charlie, who thought it was embarrassing.

Even so, there was barely anywhere Charlie went that Lucy didn't go. She even came to work with him sometimes, much to Matthew's chagrin. Lucy was Charlie's dog, but she was just as much a family pet. He'd even seen Matthew feeding her under the table on more than one occasion while Charlie was otherwise occupied in conversation with Rose. She liked to sit with her big head in Jean's lap when she was reading documents for the council and she especially liked to chase him around the backyard when he had the cricket ball in hand.

Sometimes, it was easy to forget what she was.

A cadaver dog. Charlie's cadaver dog. He didn't know when he found time to train a dog in his three-year sabbatical from Ballarat, but he did, not only that, but he was a certified dog handler too. Sometimes, Danny couldn't help but wonder if Charlie had a way with the dog, or if the dog had a way with Charlie.

Lucy barked, and Charlie broke into another jog to see what she was looking at. Danny didn't bother, he could still see where he was, so wasting his energy on jogging seemed pointless. Instead, he looked up at the sky again, and it didn't seem to be getting any clearer. Distantly, he heard another dog barking, and he assumed it belonged to Betty-Anne. An interesting woman, she was the one who apparently got Charlie into dog handling and they still seemed to be very close.

She was the type of woman he thought Charlie would like. Whip-smart, and a bit rough around the edges. If she wasn't Black, he imagined the men in Ballarat would be all over her. But she stayed away in Melbourne, and he imagined that was for the best. But every so often, there would be a call out for a place between Melbourne and Ballarat and Charlie would smile the entire day before he had to go.

He wished his own love life was one fifth as interesting as Charlie's sometimes. Since he and Rose broke things off, it just seemed as though there were no single women left in Ballarat, potentially all of Australia. He'd heard about women feeling like they were old maids if they weren't married by a certain age, was there a version of that for men? Old...Housekeeper? Maybe he should put more thought into that.

Glancing up, he noticed Charlie had made significant ground in the time he'd been contemplating the mysteries of love.

"Hey! Wait up!" He called, and Charlie stopped and turned, just as the ground was coming up to reach his face. He was, strangely enough, very aware that he was falling over. He threw his hands out to try and catch himself, but he was a fraction off, and he ended up chin first on the ground.

Winded, he lay there dazed and confused by the sudden feeling of being horizontal.

"Oh, bloody hell!"

Using one of his torn up palms, Danny attempted to get himself up a little bit only to slip on the muddy ground and land back down. Charlie jogged over, Lucy nipping at his heels as he did so. He knelt in the mud and helped Danny up so he was keeling as well.

"Move your hands," Charlie ordered, and Danny did, hardly even aware that he'd moved them there in the first place. Charlie touched his chin and tilted his head to examine the wound on his chin. Whatever was wrong with him must be pretty bad he thought, as fear washed over Charlie's features in a way he'd never seen before.

"Shit, shit, shit."

"Usually I'm the one that swears," Danny said, reaching up to touch his face. Charlie pulled his hand away and began fussing inside the satchel slung around his shoulders until he was able to find a towel and put it onto what Danny was slowly beginning to realize was an open wound. Charlie spared a glance to the compass on his wrist as the sky began to split and a light splatter of rain began to fall. Charlie cursed under his breath and urged Danny to his feet.

Looking down, Danny couldn't see much damage but the pain that was slowly reaching his brain indicated he had at least one scrapped knee.

"Can you walk a little further?" Charlie asked.

"Why?" Danny asked.

"There's a shelter just around that bend where we can wait out the storm." And maybe get you a bandaid, but that was implied.

"If I can't?" Danny asked, testing out his ankles and finding one might be strained, and his bad knee was already aching from being jostled but aside from that found them to be functional.

"Then I'll have to carry you," Charlie said, as serious as a heart attack.

"You couldn't even if you wanted too," Danny said, accepting Charlie's arm under his own so he didn't have to put so much pressure on his sore ankle.

"Don't talk. Just focus on walking." Charlie said and grunted as Danny put more weight on him. Lucy whined loudly and proceeded to bound just slightly ahead, and then stopped as they caught up. She was well trained, he thought, as he focused on keeping moving; despite every instinct he had telling him to stop and rest.

Charlie was right about the shelter being just around the bend, as it turns out. What does not turn out is the state of the shelter. He was expecting some kind of shack, but instead, it seemed to be some kind of old camp site, with a long drop and a picnic table under a rusty tin roof. But, as the rain was getting heavier and the pain was starting to settle in Danny knew he had little choice other than to let Charlie steer him there.

He collapsed gratefully onto the hard surface of the bench; happy to have the weight off his legs. Charlie didn't stop, instead, he was emptying the contents of a first aid kit onto the table, seemingly looking for something. Danny focused on keeping pressure on his wound. It felt deep under the towel. Which was really not good out here and far away from any medical facilities.

Charlie sifted through his supplies before he decided on what seemed to be some sort of sticky pad, a handful of bandaids and some gauze. He grabbed his canteen off his belt and tipped some clean water onto his hands before turning back to face Danny; serious looking expression in his face.

"Take your hand away." He ordered, and Danny did. He expected there to be a pulling sensation from where the towel was stuck to his skin and the blood had gone tacky but there was none. In fact; his chin didn't feel tacky at all. It felt wet, despite the walk from there to here feeling as though it took ten minutes. That was a worry, he thought grimly. Charlie looked about as grim as he felt as he turned Danny's chin side to side to look at it.

"I think there's still gravel in there." He said, "But I have no idea why it's so bad. You must have hit it on something sharp." Danny was in no position to disagree with him but frankly his mind was empty of the exact moment he hit the ground. Since Charlie was still holding onto his chin and looking concerned it didn't seem as though he was looking for an answer.

Charlie grabbed a pair of tweezers from the table and then a small brown bottle of something that smelled distinctly of antiseptic. Danny tensed but didn't try to move away when Charlie poked at the injury carefully. Instead, he tried to focus on something else. The heavy rain causing little rivers of mud on the thirsty ground. Wet birds seeking cover in the trees. The smell of water hitting the tin roof. It didn't work, at least, not the way he'd hoped it would. He felt every twitch of Charlie's work under his skin.

"Can you hurry up?" He slurred.

"Stop talking," Charlie replied but must have been satisfied with his work because he pulled the tweezers away and wiped them on the towel Danny had been holding. "I'm going to to use some of these to close the wound." He said, holding up a butterfly bandaid.

"Will, that stops the bleeding?"

"I hope so." Discouraged by his lack of confidence, Danny frowned but didn't push him away as he smoothed it down on his face. Charlie had freezing hands, he noted, when he expected a warm touch.

After the bandaid was on, Charlie sat back on his ankles and gave his chin one last once over before picking up his canteen again to wash the blood off his hands before it got to drying. Shaking them out, he wiped what remained of the now tinted water off on his dark pants. The stain doesn't show as more than any of the other wetness the rain had left behind; which Danny decided was a good thing. Lucy, who had been pacing backward and forwards under the table restlessly decided that she should come around to the slightly raised slab of concrete the table was bolted too and put her body over the top of Danny's feet as Charlie stood up.

"If it hurts too much, I have some ibuprofen." He said, putting his supplies back into the metal box from where they came.

"I should be right," Danny said. "Thanks, though."

"Well, Jean'll have me drawn and quartered if she thought I was letting you suffer." He responded, dryly.

"Jean, huh?" He inquired, as Charlie turned his face half to him.

"Your aunt Jean? Jesus, how hard did you hit your head?"

"I didn't." Danny insisted, "I just...I've never heard you call her that before. Usually just...Mrs. Blake."

"I didn't even notice." He admitted, "I think I occasionally still call her Mrs. Beazley as well."

"You do," Danny confirmed.

"Does it...Upset her? Should I make a more concentrated effort to use Mrs. Blake?"

"I don't think she cares," Danny replied, even though he knew full well he probably wasn't the authority on what his aunt preferred to be referred to as. "More than anything, she's just happy to have you back at the house."

"Hm," Charlie said, noncommittally as he put the metal case back in his bag. He sat, and started off down the path they came for a few moments.

"Okay." He said, in a tone that would indicate that he was about to begin reciting his plan. Danny was not disappointed when he continued with "We have to wait for the rain to stop, then we'll get back to the cars. I think you should get that cut looked at by a professional."

"How bad is it?"

"Well, you don't have any visible bone or subcutaneous fat, which is good. But it's still pretty deep; I'm not convinced that my makeshift first aid is hygienic."

"Alright, Doctor Davis."

"I told you to wear better shoes," Charlie replied and moved as far away as he could get while still staying under the protection of the shelter.

Danny let out a deflated sigh and turned so that he was sitting at the table rather than using it as a backrest. His intention of coming on this trip with Charlie was to try and build a better friendship with him and it seemed all he'd done was make things worse. He crossed his fingers and looked at Lucy who was still under the table a little damp but no worse for wear.

"Sorry." He said finally.

"Well, can't really blame you for an accident." He replied watching as the rain slowly turned to hail, as the little white dots danced along the ground. As the wind picked up, they followed the gale and Charlie had to abandon his post to come back under the shelter. He was wearing one of those dog ear styled hats and when he took it off; his hair was dry. Danny observed him for another moment before Lucy jumped up onto the seat next to him. She barked enthusiastically at them both and seemed like she might want to run out into the rain to play, however, under Charlie's watchful eye she did no such thing.

Danny had a dog when he was a boy. His mother called it a bitzer, or a mutt. When his father got back from the war, he put it down in their backyard because the barking got on his nerves. Danny didn't think he'd ever really forgiven the man for that, though he had forgiven him a lot of other things he'd done in his life. He was a good dog too. Always came when Danny called him and liked to sleep curled up at the foot of his bed like one of those book dogs. At the time he'd been so mad that he spent a week living up on the farm with Aunty Jean.

"How'd you get the dog?" He asked, suddenly finding himself overwhelmed by the quiet that had settled on them. Charlie shrugged.

"Betty-Anne gave her to me."

"How did she know you were in the market for a dog?" He asked, leaning forward on his arms.

"I wasn't," Charlie said, breaking eye contact to look at something in the distance.

"We worked together on a case. I needed someone with dog skills to help me figure out if a tip was good or not. We got on really well. She taught me dog stuff and I promised to call her if I needed any more help with dogs."

"Lemme guess, she just so happened to have a spare dog."

"Not too far off it," Charlie said, resting one of his hands on her fluffy back. "She called me up one night and said that she knew I wasn't interested in pursuing K9 all the time, but that she had this puppy and she thought we'd be a good fit."

"Are you?"

"It was love at first sight," Charlie confirmed. "How could anyone say no to this face?"

"Have you ever thought about taking her onto one of you and the Boss's secret trips to Sydney?"

"They aren't exactly secret if we tell everyone about them," Charlie said, rolling his eyes

"But have you thought about it?" Danny persisted

"Why? She's a cadaver dog. She can only find cadavers."

"So you think he's still alive." Charlie refused to meet his eye and starred off into the bush. Lucy whined, perhaps able to detect the change in the air. Charlie raised one hand, and let it rest on the top of her head to quiet her. "Do you think he's alive?" Charlie finally looked back around but before he could open his mouth Danny spoke again. "What you think, Charlie. Not what you think Matthew Lawson wants you to say." He shut his mouth, crinkled his forehead and then spoke.

"Do you know what it would feel like to fall from the Sydney Harbor Bridge?" He asked.

"No."

"Neither do I, but I can tell you the science behind it."

"Okay." He said, hesitantly.

"The way water works is that the more speed you hit it with, the stronger the surface tension of it is."

"So when you hit it-"

"It would be about the equivalent of crashing body first into a brick wall."

"Ouch." Is all Danny can come up with as a reply.

"So, as the eyewitnesses said, Lucien Blake fell off the Sydney Harbor Bridge and hit the water. He's knocked unconscious by the impact, and as his clothes become waterlogged, he is dragged underwater where he drowns." Charlie said matter of factly."Do you know what happens when a body is underwater for a long period of time?" Danny shook his head mutely, "It bloats, saponifies, and is attacked by various ocean life or passing boats. Generally speaking, the only part to make it to shore is the feet and shoes. The ankles are destroyed by the current or ocean life and the feet, safe in their shoes, drift to shore. Someday, if we're very lucky, his leather shoes will wash up on a beach somewhere, Jean will know the truth and we'll be free from this waiting game."

"So you think that he's dead?"

"Let's say it went the other way." He said, raising one hand and displaying it palm down. "Let's say he survives, gets out of his coat, manages to swim, which is not unfeasible for a healthy, athletic man, to a heavily trafficked platform without raising suspicion. Then what? Why doesn't he come home? He wanders around Sydney with amnesia for three years? He succumbs to the elements and injuries sustained by the fall?" He asked, sounding very much like someone who has put a lot more thought into this than he would have expected.

"I don't know," Danny admitted. "I guess I hadn't really thought about the mechanics of how."

"What about the third option?" Charlie asked, "What if he was never on that bridge? You know as well as I do how unreliable eyewitnesses can be."

"You and Matthew would have wasted a lot of time."

"Maybe. Maybe he's not missing. Maybe he's already reached out to Jean, or Matthew and they know where he is but can't tell us. Maybe I know the answer. For all you know, I helped him get a fake passport, and escape to Central Asia to herd yaks. For all I know, you know exactly where he is and you're trying to figure out if I'm onto you."

"Why would I do that?"

"You probably wouldn't, just like how I wouldn't be able to keep a secret like that from Matthew. But do you see what I'm getting at? It's all a conspiracy."

"What, like the moon is made of cheese?"

"Have you ever been to the moon? Can you prove it's not?"

"No." He said, frowning. Lucy seemed to get bored with the conversation and head back to the ground where she paced the perimeter of the shelter.

"That's what I'm trying to say. It's all conspiracy. When we don't have all the answers, we tend to come up with stories to explain them. None of them have any solid proof. Not the state of the moon, or if Lucien Blake is alive or dead."

"But you must have a theory." Danny needled before reaching up to touch his chin. His fingers came away with only tacky blood. Outside the shelter, the rain has stopped.

"You're a persistent bastard you know that? I'm trying to broaden your horizons here."

"I'm trying to find out what you think." Danny insisted. Seeing no way to talk his way out of it Charlie relented.

"Occam's razor would say he's dead."

"What's Occam's razor?"

"It's a fancy way of saying that the simplest explanation is usually the right one."

"Where did you learn that?" He asked

"Same place I learned all that other stuff. Dr. Harvey." Danny nodded to himself, accepting this answer unquestioningly. "What do you think?"

"Me?"

"No, the dog. Yes, you." Not expecting Charlie to fire the question back on him, Danny sat back in his chair and thought about it for just a moment, before coming to an answer.

"I agree, with what you said about Occam's Razor."

They both took in the gravity of their respective confessions and looked at one another. Danny looked at Charlie's face and saw…What he always saw. Just a man, the same as any other man. A man with a dog, and a man who carried his grief like an old friend. Danny couldn't help but wonder what it was Charlie saw in him.

"This stays between us." He said, softly.

"Of course."

Lucy let off a series of barks and stepped down onto the ground outside the shelter excited to get going. Charlie stood up and put his dog flap hat back on, this time tying the straps under his chin in a loose knot.

"Can you walk back to the cars?"

"Probably," Danny said, limping to his feet.

"Then let's blow out." He said, hanging his bag over his shoulder.


End file.
